This invention generally relates to a golf club cleaning machine and more particularly to an ultrasonic golf club cleaning apparatus for cleaning golf club heads and grips.
Golfers who play golf outdoors on living turf often foul their clubs with grass, mud and other debris, which accumulates on the indented and flat portions of the grips and club heads. The debris on the club grips prevents a golfer from optimizing his/her golf swing by interfering with the golfer's grip on the club, potentially causing the golfer to lose the desired grip thereon during the full swing of a golf club. In addition, debris on the club head may potentially interfere with the path of the golf ball when the club face impacts the golf ball on the downswing.
Furthermore, debris on the golf club result not only in the decreased performance of the golfer including sliperiness of the club shaft, but also in the useful life of the equipment itself. By placing soiled clubs into a golf bag, the golfer thereby causes the golf bag to become soiled and/or damaged, with the potential for transporting the debris into the player's golf cart, car and home. It would therefore be extremely advantageous to provide a device for cleaning golf clubs which does not require the golfer to manually clean the clubs using rags, brushes and cleaning solutions.
One golf club head cleaning device and method of cleaning is that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,101,089 issued to Brown et al. In that device, ultrasonic energy is used to clean at least one club head which is submersed within a cleaning solution held in a tank. That device contains two tanks, one for wooden club heads and the other for metal club heads, the second tank having a greater number of ultrasonic transducers for cleaning the more resilient metal club heads.
While the Brown device is apparently suitable for its intended purposes, the device relies on the manual filling and draining of the tanks with the clean and/or soiled cleaning solution and/or water, necessitating the presence of a person to properly monitor the maintenance thereof. In addition, since the cleaning solution apparently must be manually poured into the tanks from the top of the device, this necessitates the separate storage of the cleaning solution apart from the device potentially resulting in spills, injury to the person pouring the liquid and/or to those in the vicinity of the device. Further, since the tanks are drained by manually opening a drain located at the bottom of the tanks, the device may only be cleaned when a person is present to perform that function, in addition to having to fill the tanks with a liquid to drain any sediment from the tanks prior to their being refilled with fresh cleaning solution. It therefore appears that the Brown device can only be properly activated and maintained during the business hours of the location at which the machine is located and may not be in a "ready" state for use at all times.
Accordingly, a need exists for an automatic, self-contained golf club cleaning apparatus to be used in cleaning golf club heads and grips.